Ok, so I have thought about writing my Mom's story for awhile, but as I started it today, I realized it is also my Grandma's strength that comes shining through as well. It is long and I will work on it over the next couple of days, but I couldn't tell my Mom's story without telling my Grandma's story. It reads like a fiction novel.....lol. But, even though we strive for anonymity, I will tell you a secret about my heritage in the end. I figured out awhile back, in order to share my life on this forum, it would be easy to figure out who I am, so I don't worry about it any longer. Even without names, the stories would give it away easily. So, if family stumbles across this, it is nothing they don't already know. And if my DS and DIL do, well then hopefully they will learn something and see how hard it is to do the best you can as a parent.
My Mother was born in 1939, right at the end of the Depression. My Grandpa was a janitor for the local school system and ran moonshine with his buddies, while my Grandma stayed at home. My Grandparents had grown up in a poor, rural farming community and had married when Grandpa was twenty-five and Grandma was fifteen. The house was nothing more than a one room shack. Grandma was a firm believer in Church and would walk there, carrying my Mother and dragging her two year old brother every Sunday without fail. Grandpa wanted nothing to do with the Church but didn’t care that Grandma did, because that gave him time to go get in trouble with his buddies and fool with the still. My Grandma's Daddy was an ordained Minister and she believed in religion very strongly. But her Daddy had left his wife when Grandma was young, leaving behind a wife and several kids. Just because you are ordained, doesn't make you Godly. Grandma was in the middle and her Mother was a sick women, so she had helped raise her younger brothers and sisters until she left home. She said back then that once you turned fourteen, Mothers were hoping a nice young man would come along and marry you so they would have one less mouth to feed.
When my Mother was two, she developed red measles. She was deathly ill and by the time Grandma finally convinced Grandpa she needed a Doctor, it was almost too late. The Doctor said the measles had gone “inside” and she needed a hospital. They hauled her to the nearest City and the hospital went to work on her. It was touch and go, and as the days passed, her eardrums burst. The hospital said the measles attacked her eardrums. I am sure now it would have been attributed to the high fevers and fluid buildup in her ears, but back then, they said it was the measles. When she was better, they had her transferred to an institution to continue recovering. There were two reasons for this. Grandma and Grandpa couldn't afford a big hospital bill and the state would provide her care there for free, and because her eardrums were burst, the hospital decided she was now useless and would be better off there. Remember, this was 1941.
Well Grandma was all for getting her better but not for locking her away. The Doctors at the institution told her they could do surgery to repair her ears after she got better. That was the only reason Grandma allowed them to keep her but she told them she was taking her home with her once she was better. Over the next two years, they performed five unsuccessful surgeries on her ears before Grandma finally had enough and brought her home. Grandma used to tell me that was the hardest two years of her life, leaving her there. She would visit as often as she could, but they didn't have the money to get there as often as she would have liked. Grandma described the place as very stark and cold. Metal beds with thin mattresses and many mentally challenged children. That was what many parents did with the children that were handicapped back then. They didn't know what else to do but lock them away.
After Grandma got her home, they were resigned to the fact she was mostly deaf. Either the surgeries had done a little good, or one of her eardrums had healed enough on its own, but Grandma found she could hear slightly out of one ear. Grandma had been doing their own version of sign language some, but now made her speak most of the time. Luckily, since Mom was two before everything happened, she had already developed many of her language skills. Grandma worked with her to continue developing them and wouldn't let her get away with not speaking. My Mother says it was a daily fight to get her to do it as she found it easier to sign. My Grandma was persistent and treated her no differently than her brother. If she wanted something, she had to ask while signing. Mom would purposefully stay out in the woods playing, even though her brother would tell her that Grandma was yelling for them, and pretend she didn't hear them, to get out of chores. My Grandma was no fool and would strip a branch from her snowball bush and wear Mom out, telling her she didn't want to ever see or hear her using her loss of hearing as an excuse. My Mother says the only time Grandma ever whipped her, was over her ears and stubbornness. Usually it was Grandpa that wore them out for normal mischief.
When Mom was six, my Grandpa had made enough money from running moonshine, to buy them a house in the outskirts of the nearest city. He said he did if for Grandma and the kids, but Grandma always said he did it so he could be closer to some of his clients that were in influential positions. But, the house was huge compared to how they were raised. It had five rooms and over the years, they added on. It was found out many years later that the house was given to Grandpa for next to nothing because of his other dealings. Grandma enrolled Mom and her brother in school and my Mother says that school was the most miserable time in her life. The teachers back then had no sympathy for her deafness and would put her in the back of the room. They saw her as a hindrance to the other kids and didn't want her there. They told Grandma she should be in an institution. But Grandma refused and took her every day. My Grandma had spunk in her little 4’11” body. She was the most gentle, kindest, religious person you have ever met, but no one said her kids couldn't do something. Mom says it was then that she figured out if she watched people, she could figure out what they were saying by watching their lips move. An art she perfected over the years, and gave me much grief as a teenager. The second reason she hated school was the cruelness of the other children. They saw her as an idiot, and about twice a year, her eardrums would get infected so bad, that they would have pus pockets form. When the pockets would finally burst, Mom says they smelled like rotten eggs. So the kids and teacher were especially cruel to her when this would happen. She remembers the teacher saying, "Doesn't your Mother bathe you?” and then the kids chanting you don't bathe…you don't bathe….” Mom says now that she can hardly blame them, as she stunk really badly for a few days when this would happen. But at that age, she would go home in tears every day. Grandma would comfort her for a little while, and then set her back on her feet telling her that “No one can make you feel bad about yourself if you don’t let them. Those people are just ignorant and don’t know any better.”
The next few years were spent in school, home doing chores and Grandma still teaching her as well. Grandpa always made at least 3 acres worth of gardens. He did it so they would have food, and enough to sell to the neighbors to make a little money. Grandpa was always trying to figure out how to make money. By this time, moonshine was going by the wayside and Grandpa liked to be able to afford his own whiskey too. So the gardens got larger and the work harder. They spent spring and summer months tending the garden, harvesting, canning and selling from a little stand in the front yard. During winter season, they would get 100 chickens from my Grandma’s brother who owned a chicken farm and spend weeks killing and fixing those. All the time attending Church, revivals, Bible school, and entertaining relatives for weeks at a time. Grandma would feed anyone that was hungry and since they were considered “well-off” by their relatives, they would always have someone at their house or Grandma would travel and deliver extra garden goods to their relatives that were still in the rural areas. They managed to save enough money to give Mom a couple more surgeries trying to fix the problems, but it still didn't work.
When Mom was twelve, a lady showed up on their front step with four children in tow. After talking to her a few minutes, it was discovered that she was my Grandmother's Father's second wife and kids. On a family tree, this was her stepmother and the four kids, her half brother and sisters. The lady introduced herself and explained that he had abandoned all of them a few months back. She was very sick and the kids were starving. She had no family of her own and someone had told her back in the country, about my Grandma and how “well-off” they were. So she had caught a few rides, walked a few miles and ended up on her doorstep with four children, ages two through seven, three girls and the oldest a boy. My Grandma and Grandpa took them in, expecting to have them for a few weeks. They were going to help get her well, and then try to find somewhere for them to go. They settled them all in, with the kids all piled in the room with my Mom and her brother, and the lady in their room. Grandma and Grandpa slept on the floor. Within a few days, it was obvious that the Lady was not getting better. Grandma sent for a Doctor and he diagnosed her with consumption and said to prepare to bury her. And that is what happened. They cared for her over the next few weeks, but she died. Now Grandma and Grandpa had her four kids in addition to their two. Grandpa wanted to try and find them homes, but Grandma pitched a fit because she saw them as her responsibility now since there was no other family on the Lady's side, according to her. Grandpa ended up going back to the country and searching for her relatives, but couldn't find any. So Grandma, on the sly, went and found a lawyer that would write up adoption papers, waited until Grandpa was deep in a whiskey bottle and had him sign them.
Yes, now my Grandma's half brother and sisters were officially her children. And my Mother's half uncle and aunts were now her brothers and sisters.
